...a meticulously researched book that is, at its heart, a stern telling-off of us as readers ... Through a combination of beautifully precise close readings alongside Austen’s biographical, literary and historical context, Kelly shows us that the novels were about nothing more or less than the burning political questions of the day ... It is a shame that Kelly doesn’t leave much room for Austen’s bitingly funny letters and juvenilia, both of which can leave no reader in doubt of Austen’s disposition toward the satirical, the radical and, more often than not, the grotesque. I was also not sold on Kelly’s decision to open each chapter with a short fictional section based on Austen’s letters ... But these are minor complaints in an otherwise deeply welcome book. Kelly has produced a sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves.
Jane Austen: The Secret Radical sets out to raise hackles. As she asserts, almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. There has been, according to Kelly, only one person who has ever read Jane Austen right. That would be Helena Kelly ... Kelly sweeps the board clear of all previous critical commentary — just so much clutter, we must understand. Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed 1997 biography is dismissed in a footnote as having hopelessly missed the point of Mansfield Park. R. W. Chapman, the scholar who founded modern Austen studies, is a purveyor of 'nonsense' ... But, taking a deep breath, I concede that it is, stripped of its flights of fancy, an important revisionary work for 2017 ... Kelly’s book is reckless, but she knows the novels inside out. Her views, when not designed to annoy the reader, are informative ... Helena Kelly provokes. But in Jane Austen: The Secret Radical she has given us a book for 2017, perhaps the most turmoil-filled year in Britain since 1945. So, with a patient sigh, let’s do what she tells us to and read the novels again.
Kelly argues — passionately and engagingly, if not always convincingly — that modern readers have failed to read Austen as she was meant to be read: in the context of her historical moment ... Her critical method is to focus microscopically, generating meaning from the smallest details of the novels — names of people and places, lines of poetry quoted, the etymology of words — juxtaposed with historical context ... We don’t have to subscribe to Kelly’s vision of Austen as a political revolutionary to understand her as a radical, though not a secret one. That her novels prioritized the true circumstances for women in her era is radical enough.
In Kelly’s view, Austen’s novels are a kind of samizdat, concealing radical messages beneath their conventional surfaces. Kelly never says, however, what she means by ‘radical’ … Her case for the radicalism of the novels rests instead on a mixture of psychological interpretation and political hypothesis—sometimes ingenious, but more often speculative and circular. She loves solving ‘word games and anagrams’ that she alone has detected in Austen’s fiction, all of which somehow turn out to support her argument … Kelly’s claim to have read each of the six novels ‘as Jane intended us to’ is a bold one, but it’s undermined by her own writing and perspective. She describes Austen as ‘an authoress,’ an antiquated feminine form that, like ‘poetess,’ serves to trivialize Austen as a woman writer.
In dissecting Austen’s feelings on parents, especially fathers, sexuality, and 19th-century life, Kelly exposes a depth beyond what at first may seem to be silly characters. A fine-grained study that shows us how to read between the lines to discover the remarkable woman who helped transform the novel from trash to an absolute art form.
This route into Austen deserves more attention, but Kelly’s book, despite offering interesting tidbits, meanders in too many directions ... Kelly also makes the questionable decision to open each chapter with a fictionalized 'sweet' vignette about Austen’s life. A reader might wonder whether Kelly considers Austen a serious radical or, as in one segment, a silly child-woman 'giggling' as she 'skips.' This book, written with airy nonchalance, seems to hope to cater to multiple Austen constituencies but is likely to end up pleasing few.
